Blood sport

More than one hundred people were killed in a suicide attack in Kandahar yesterday. Another hundred or so were wounded.

They’d been watching a dog fight.

When I heard that I thought of the evening last year when I went to the dogs at Walthamstow in London with some friends. Of the carnage there would have been if a bomb had gone of there.

Still I can’t imagine the horror of it, and hope I never really have to.

The press are saying it was targeted against Abdul Hakim Jan, described either as the leader of a local militia or as a police chief.

Such a huge blast to kill one man. The Taliban are the usual suspects but have not claimed responsibility. They are unlikely to given the number of civilians killed. That sort of thing doesn’t tend to endear local people to them. But then people will make of it what they will anyway.

“I doubt the Taliban would do such a thing,” Tooryalai told a Reuters reporter during a mourning ceremony in Arghandab.
“This was the work of foreigners in order to give a bad name to the Taliban and to justify their presence here in Afghanistan by saying ‘security is bad and we can’t leave’,” he said. Others nearby nodded in agreement.

If the numbers killed are confirmed it will be the worst attack since 2001. Not that that particularly matters to the families of those who have died.